


Rain

by Kendrene



Series: Smut(not so)Cation 2018 [3]
Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Smut, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 06:31:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15213239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kendrene/pseuds/Kendrene
Summary: For Nicole Haught there is something deeply unsettling about rain.It’s the way it drips down window panes, fragmenting the world into a confused puzzle; its drumming atop rooftops, which turns deafening until it drowns all thought when soft rains become a downpour.It’s the fact that no matter how well one dresses against it, rain always finds a way. It soaks the skin until it shrivels, weighs down hair, chills to the bone.Nicole only needs to close her eyes during a storm to remember how her intense dislike for rain started.





	Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Figured I'd try my hand at a bit of character study...without foregoing some smut, because it's me after all. 
> 
> A special thank you goes to my amazing Beta, @TheGaySmurf
> 
> I hope you all enjoy.
> 
> \- Dren

For Nicole Haught there is something deeply unsettling about rain.

It’s the way it drips down window panes, fragmenting the world into a confused puzzle; its drumming atop rooftops, which turns deafening until it drowns all thought when soft rains become a downpour. 

It’s the fact that no matter how well one dresses against it, rain always finds a way. It soaks the skin until it shrivels, weighs down hair, chills to the bone. 

Nicole only needs to close her eyes during a storm to remember how her intense dislike for rain started. 

It’s downright pouring when it all begins, daylight all but swallowed up by rolling clouds. They hide the blue beneath and bloat out the sun, and to Nicole’s young mind it looks like monsters hide in every puff of dust the rain kicks up as it hits the ground. 

Despite the plastic poncho her mama had thrown over her train stamped pajamas, Nicole is cold and shivery, and the backpack she clutches to her chest - Mr. Brown stuffed inside it - is soaked, too. She  _ hates _ the rain, and worries Mr. Brown will get sick. 

_ It’s for the best, baby. _

Those are the words her mama tells her when she leaves Nicole on her grandparents’ doorstep.  _ For the best. _

Nicole calls her name, but the rain is roaring so loudly that mama doesn’t hear her and keeps on walking.

***

She gets letters for a while, the postmarks always pointing to a different place. There’s so many letters in the beginning that Nicole has a whole stack of them inside her nightstand drawer. She likes it at her grandparents’; they own sheep, and cattle, and horses, and Nicole always has somewhere new to explore. Plus, with the steady stream of letters coming, it almost feels like mama is with her. She forgets about rain for a while - it doesn’t rain much in Kansas - and when a storm comes, it’s gone before Nicole has a chance to be upset by it. 

But nothing lasts forever, not even the longest summer of her life. The letters slow, then taper off. The last, she gets during a late August storm, with the wind screaming so hard across their roof, it takes more than a few shingles along. The envelope is dripping with rain and the ink inside is smudged, the letters runny like her nose when she gets sick. Nicole squints at the letter until her eyes burn, but she can’t read what it says, and neither can Grandma when, frustrated, she hands the letter over.

Outside, the rain falls until the ground is brown with mud, and there’s rain in her eyes, too.

***

It rains the morning Nicole follows her grandpa to the stables, an unloaded shotgun slung across his back, the double chambers staring back at her like a pair of black eyes. There is no other way, their local veterinarian is out of the state on vacation, and they can’t wait for him to get back. There’s no other way, but Chix is the mare she learned to ride on - the mare that patiently taught Nicole a thing or three about horses - and it hurts. 

_ You don’t have to do this. _

Her grandfather’s hand on her shoulder is heavy, gentle. Grounding. 

_ Yeah, I do. _

He’d taught Nicole to handle a gun over the winter, when the days were short and dark and the ranch required less tending. At first he’d sat her down and explained the theory - what each part of the double-barreled shotgun was called, how to clean it, the do’s and don’ts with a particular emphasis on the latter. 

Then, after peering into her eyes for interminable minutes, he’d taken her out back to practice on empty soup cans and beer bottles he’d kept just for that reason.

He waits under the rain while Nicole says her goodbyes, while she presses her cheek against the mare’s smoke-grey side. Chix’s breath is labored, her head lowered, but as always when she feels Nicole’s hand, she snorts softly in greeting. 

Leading her into the rain is the hardest thing Nicole has ever done, and as she does, she tilts her head skyward so that the rain will mask her tears. 

But maybe she’s wrong - exchanging the horse’s lead for the cold metal of the shotgun is harder still.

The shot splits the air like summer thunder, even though it’s the wrong season for that. The shotgun’s stock bucks against her shoulder and bruises her, and Nicole knows she’ll ache for days. 

It rains for days, too, but gentle.

***

The day of her grandparents’ funeral - a week after Uncle Ben’s voice woke her in the middle of the night to tell her about the car crash - the sky calls for rain, but Nicole doesn’t hang around long enough to see the heavens open up. She slips away through the small group of people, shaking what hands are proffered to hers, accepting the platitudes. Nobody stops her or asks where she’s going, people assuming that she’s headed back to the ranch to lay out the food, but there’s Uncle Ben and his wife for that. They’ll look after the property, too, and Nicole will get a yearly stipend from the profits the land and animals will get them. 

All of it is written down in the letter her Uncle gave her at the airport, and Nicole is thankful he didn’t try to talk her into staying. She’s not completely sure of where her future is, but it’s not Kansas, with its tornadoes and the summer storms, and the endless, rolling pastures. 

Out of the graveyard’s gates, she turns the corner and gets in her car, and in leaving this part of her life behind for good, she casts one last, distracted look toward the mourners. All in black, bent over by the driving rain, they look like a murder of crows pecking at dirt. 

*** 

Canadian rain is  _ different _ . 

Down South - Gods, she’s started to  _ think  _ about it with the capital S like those people that shroud the Great Southern States in myth - the rain is heavy, the drops of water fat and loud as they smack on the cement. The rainfall of an entire month can drop in hours, the dusty country roads of her youth turned to muck that likes nothing better than latch onto the boots of the unwary. Rain  _ pounds  _ the earth down south, hits it till it chokes, and, just when one thinks the world is ending, the sun comes out, shining hotter than before. 

Up here, the rain is  _ driven _ , or so it seems to her. There’s purpose in the way it soaks the ground for days, its patter soothing atop the firs that seemingly grow everywhere, their needles of a green so dark it appears black in gloomy weather. 

Nicole doesn’t like it, but she gets used to it. She misses the sun and the heat of the plains during summer, but whenever she thinks of taking a plane home - even just to visit - ghosts rear up inside her mind. 

They are a good deterrent. 

So she makes her peace with rain for a while, although it’d be more accurate to say it’s an uneasy truce, and goes on with her life. She enters the police academy - her mama left her something useful, at least, with dual citizenship - and even finds herself a girlfriend. 

With Amy around, rain stops bothering Nicole altogether, but there’s a little voice inside her head that tells her it won’t last. 

It doesn’t. The little reprieve Nicole has found ends with her first homicide.  

***

_ It’s not fair. _

_ She’s not even a cop yet. _

It’s fair to say that Nicole doesn’t go looking for trouble, but, quite literally, stumbles over it. 

She’s just a tired cadet, heading back to the small apartment she and Amy share after her last day of training before the final tests. Gym bag slung across one shoulder, scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face to keep her nose from freezing, she’s not really looking where she’s going. The street is dark, and the clouds overhead (which she can’t see, but feel like a suffocating blanket pressing down on her) are letting loose a mixture of snow and frozen rain that pricks her eyes. 

Her foot catches on something, making her stumble, and when she turns around, she finds the man.

The corpse.

The rest of her evening is a whirlwind; phone calls, strobe lights that paint the rain red and blue, someone putting a hot cup of coffee in her hands and asking the same questions for the hundredth time. 

When she gets home, the rain is gone, the sky paling. Amy is waiting for her, awake and upset. 

_ It could have been you. _

_ I don’t want you to do this, Nicole. I don’t want to wonder every time you go to work. _

_ You knew what you were getting into when we started dating.  _

_ It doesn’t have to be your career.  _

_ It does.  _

_ Then you’re doing it without me. _

Nicole is too tired to argue further. She drags herself to the bathroom, not bothering to knock on the bedroom door that Amy slams shut between them. She wakes on the floor hours later, still hugging the toilet in which she threw up, reeking of vomit and tasting tears. 

Amy’s things are gone. and she is, too, nothing left in her wake to show that she had indeed lived with Nicole. 

It reminds her of the way puddles dry up under the Kansas sun. 

***

Graduation day rolls around, and Nicole  _ expects _ it to rain. When it doesn't, the sun shining molten-gold on the buttons and epaulets of her freshly ironed uniform, she thinks it’s a cruel joke, because it's raining in her heart and on her bones. 

Her gaze travels along the rows of folding chairs set out on the Academy’s perfectly manicured lawns, and she hopes against all hope that Amy will be sitting there, perhaps trying to hide in back. Nicole hopes that her girlfriend - or is it ex girlfriend? They never properly broke up - changed her mind. Maybe the storm has blown over and the skies between the two of them have cleared, just like the one above her head. 

By the time the ceremony ends, it’s clear that she’s mistaken. 

The sun may hammer against her back, but clouds blanket her heart all the way home.

***

Sometimes, the sky bleeds in Purgatory. 

Not literally, but as Nicole stands naked under the shower jet, watching watered-down blood swirl into the drain, it feels that way. 

She’s scrubbed her skin until it hurts, but she still feels dirty. Stained. Some of the blood is her own, some is Wynonna’s, the specks of brownish fluid mixed in with the red belonging to a Revenant. Their injuries aren’t serious, a few cuts and scrapes that sting under the hot water, but do not really hurt, yet Nicole knows that, at this rate, they will bleed dry. 

Of course it’s pouring out, the rain pelting the windows like gravel, and the sound sets the fine hairs of her neck on edge. 

Nicole is starting to think that there is no way for her to leave the rain behind. She carries it inside, much like the Earps carry their curse.

***

She is right.

She has been right all along. 

The Widow’s venom races along her veins, its touch like frozen rain watering down her blood. It wells inside her lungs, it floods her throat, and Nicole drowns, wondering if all the turns she took in life were meant to bring her to this end. 

When Waverly finds her, there’s rain in her eyes, too. 

***

One alternate reality later, after the kind of close call some would categorize as  _ final _ , she’s lying in bed, Waverly nestled between her legs. Sweat sprouts along her hairline, her chest heaves, Waverly’s hands holding her hips steady as she comes down from her high. 

In places Waverly has had no time to lick clean yet, traces of slick paint her inner thighs, the clear droplets snaking along her skin much the same way that rain is flowing down the Homestead’s roof. 

Its touch is soft for a change, and Nicole reluctantly allows herself to be lulled by the thrumming sound. When the wind picks up, driving the rain harder against the house, the noise mirrors the wild bucking of her heart, only to die down to a murmur moments after. 

Her limbs shake, aftershocks and lingering weakness reducing her muscles to the same sort of wet mud that is surely turning the fields outside into a mire. 

What fogginess of thought she had been enjoying flees, and Nicole huffs. The rain’s patter is too insistent, bouncing and reverberating inside her skull. It whispers in her ear of ghosts, and empty barns, and gunshots. 

“You’re frowning.” Waverly follows her statement by placing a finger on Nicole’s forehead, tracing the lines of tension she finds there. 

“I’m sorry, I…” 

“It’s the rain, isn’t it?” 

Of course she’s told Waverly about the rain. She tells Waverly  _ everything _ . They’ve talked about it several times, because Nicole could not bear to vomit out all of her grief at once. She sees her entire life as a deluge, each falling drop the fragment of a memory. Some drops are fat and heavy, others frozen solid into hail. The gentle ones, the good ones, are few and far between. 

Waverly doesn’t wait for a reply. She climbs back along her body and locks their mouths together. The kiss is enough to stop Nicole from choking on all the rain she holds inside - for now. 

“Why don’t we drown it out?” Waverly whispers hot and urgent between kisses. Her breath skims Nicole’s cheek, and then she’s licking a trail up along her neck and to her earlobe. Waverly plants a kiss behind it, nips the tender patch of skin. Her lips close around Nicole’s earlobe and she sucks, hard enough to make her writhe and buck her hips. 

Hard enough to rip a liquid, broken “yes” from her gasping mouth. Before she has a chance to gather her wits and ask how, Waverly gives her the answer.

A hand slides down between them, Nicole’s muscles shifting and rippling in its wake. The firm touch is enough to set her blood aflame. The rain slicking her heart evaporates, because Waverly’s sun is too strong, too bright for Nicole’s clouds to stick around.

Fingers thrust, and Nicole screams. Louder than the rain hitting the roof, louder than the sudden peal of thunder splitting the air outside. 

Waverly has filled her in one motion, and her walls flutter wildly, struggling to adjust. Despite the roughness of her entry, Waverly’s lips remain gentle. She kisses Nicole again, slow and soothing, the hand between her legs still as she waits for her to adjust. 

It doesn’t take long. A couple deep breaths, her eyes fluttering shut, and she’s rocking forward as best she can, pinned between the bed and Waverly’s lithe body. Waverly follows her movements, fingers retreating almost out of her before she slams them back inside. 

It’s rough. Hot. Hard. It’s exactly what Nicole needs to bury the memories deep. They’ll be back, eventually, but here and now, it’s just her and Waverly. 

“More,” she pleads between clenched teeth, and Waverly obliges. Her rhythm picks up speed, fingers curling against Nicole’s front wall with every thrust, each stroke powerful and seemingly tireless. Nicole won’t last, the coil of need seated deep inside her belly ready to spring loose. 

She tries, regardless. She begs silently, knowing that Waverly’s fingers moving inside her are the only thing that keeps the endless rain at bay. 

_ Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. _

Waverly’s thumb grazes her clit, and she comes undone. 

The world dissolves into a flash of white, the sweet nothings that Waverly whispers in her ear blotting out the sound of rain. 

There’s rain inside her still - it’ll never go away - but it’s warm, and light, and gentle. It soaks in deep, but does not chill, her veins drinking it up the same way that tree roots would. 

Waverly is cradling her, the body pressed into her own sheltering her better than any man-made roof ever could, and from the safety of that embrace, Nicole can bear to listen to a rain that cannot hurt her anymore. 

*** 

The rain is  _ different _ , up north. Nourishing. 

Nicole doesn’t mind carrying a bit of it inside her, not when the heat of Waverly’s sun warms her bones after each storm passes.

It took more grey days than she can count to get here, far too long a time perhaps, but Nicole has made her peace with rain, and when she listens to it now, she hears it sing.

**Author's Note:**

> [follow me on TUMBLR for more stories and exclusive content](https://kendrene.tumblr.com/)


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